What's happening in your Oracle eBusiness Suite World?

Tuesday Sep 16, 2014

Invoice approval workflow now supports parallelization at the invoice header level on 12.1.x and 12.2.x.

The main advantage for this change is to shorten the processing time for an invoice to get approved.

The
parallel approval process imposes a hierarchical (tree) structure on
the transaction’s approver list and enables each part of the tree at a
given level to progress through its notification-approval cycle
asynchronously.

This enables the approval process of each item in
the transaction to continue irrespective of the progress of approval
process of other items in the transaction and reduces the transaction's
approval process time.

If user selects the parallel ordering
mode, the approval notifications will be sent to all approvers at the
same time. The invoice may get approved when one or all approvers
approve the invoice, depending on the voting regime that is set up.

What voting regimes are supported?

Serial:This voting regime assigns group-or-chain-member order numbers in ascending order of the member order numbers, breaking ties arbitrarily.All group members must approve the notification in order for the invoice to get approved.

Consensus:This voting regime assigns group-or-chain-member oder number one to all members.All group members must approve the notification in order for the invoice to get approved.

First-Responder-Wins:This voting regime assigns group-or-chain-member order number one to all members.As soon as one approver approves the notification, the invoice will get approved.

Order number:This voting regime sets each member's group-or-chain-member order number to the member's order number.All group members must approve the notification in order for the invoice to get approved.

Friday Sep 05, 2014

What has changed?

The Invoice Validation concurrent program is now equipped to spawn multiple child requests based on the Purchase Order matched invoice load and the newly seeded profile "AP:Maximum Invoice Validation Child Requests".

The user continues to submit a single Invoice validation program with his/her preferred parameters but internally the program groups the invoices matched to same Purchase Orders and ensures that each such group is processed by a single child request.

Whereas for invoices that are not matched to any Purchase Orders, the system distributes these invoices equally amongst the maximum number of child requests spawned (as per the value set by the user in the aforementioned profile).

Why the change?

1) The current invoice validation concurrent program was not scaling up for high volume of invoices.

2) If multiple requests of the invoice validation concurrent program are submitted and invoices matched to the same Purchase Orders are processed by two or more requests then there are possibilities of lock contention errors on PO_HEADERS_ALL in any of the requests that concurrently attempts to update the PO object.

3) To avoid conflicts, user had to wisely select the parameters at the time of submitting the concurrent program or have conflict domains defined that constrained the program to execute serially.

4) Submitting multiple requests of the program causes an overhead of reviewing multiple log files and outputs.

Tuesday May 13, 2014

Confused by the iSupplier Create Invoice functionality?

Suppliers can directly create invoices in Oracle iSupplier portal. They can create PO matched or Non PO matched invoices and submit them for approval to the company. Once approved and validated, these invoices will be ready for payment.

A white paper was created that provides a step-by-step guide for setting up and allowing suppliers to create invoices using the iSupplier portal:

This document uses different media including a recorded demo to walk a User through the standard everyday process of setting up and creating Intercompany Invoices.

Get a refresher course on how to set up an internal sales order for Intercompany Ivoicing, importing records into Accounts Receivable, and running the INCIAP (create Intercompany AP Invoice program). Get to the point of a created Intercompany Invoice:

Are you one of those bean counter types that needs to know the accounting distributions? Check out the 'Advanced Accounting' section.

What happens if you run into an an error when processing? Document 784679.1 contains some dynamite examples of debug log files, with annotation and color codes, all found in the The 'Debugging Proces(s)' section. 'Red' highlights table data, 'Green' shows data that is a forms path or profile option, and 'Purple' shows error messages. The debug section includes both Accounts Receiveable and Payables debug log file examples. Also check out the 'Brown Bag' section for scripts to help you solve the most common Intercompany error messages.

Intercompany Invoicing integrates many different Products and many different scenarios. This overview will help you cover your bases with the basic set-up, processing, and debugging of standard Intercompany Invoicing. Enjoy, and happy invoicing!

About

Welcome to the EBS Support Blog where Oracle insiders share news and information about EBS products including new releases, tips and tricks, troubleshooting guides, upcoming webcasts and links to EBS Communities.